Sam Cooke's former office location

At 6425 Hollywood Boulevard, Sam Cooke ran the offices of SAR Records — the independent label he founded in 1959 with manager J.W. Alexander and businessman Roy Crain. The office was a modest affair: two desks, a piano, and an ambition to build a Black-owned music business that could operate on its own terms, outside the control of the major labels that had profited enormously from Black artists while giving them little ownership or creative control.

SAR became a genuine operation, signing and developing artists including Lou Rawls, Billy Preston, and the Womack Brothers — a Cleveland gospel family who would go on to become the Valentinos. Cooke used the office as a base not just for recording but for management, publishing (through his Kags Music company), and artist development. He was building an empire, methodically, at a time when few Black artists had any real power over their own careers.

Sam Cooke was shot and killed at the Hacienda Motel in Los Angeles on December 11, 1964, at the age of 33. The Hollywood Boulevard office closed with him, and most of what he was building dissolved in the aftermath of his death. The building still stands on Hollywood Boulevard, unremarkable from the outside, with no marker acknowledging what was once planned and partially realised within it.